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After Many Tough Choices, the Choice to Quit

Senator Olympia J. Snowe decided to leave at a time of uneasiness by centrists from both parties.Credit
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The looming Senate vote on a Republican plan to give employers the right to withdraw health care coverage based on religious and moral convictions put Senator Olympia J. Snowe in a tough but familiar position: weighing her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.

A longtime advocate of increasing access to health care and one of a dwindling number of Republican backers of abortion rights, Ms. Snowe believed that the language was too broad and could have unintended consequences. At the same time, an embattled Republican colleague, Senator Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, had publicly backed it, and a “no” vote from Ms. Snowe, of Maine, could isolate him as he sought to fend off anger in his heavily Democratic state.

It was the type of difficult choice that led to her surprise announcement on Tuesday to give up on the Senate, and it reflected growing uneasiness among Republican moderates with the return to a focus on social issues and with demands for party purity in the Republican electorate.

“Everybody’s got to rethink how we approach legislating and governance in the United States Senate,” Ms. Snowe said in an interview on Wednesday. She shook her head at how “we’ve miniaturized the process in the United States Senate,” no longer allowing lawmakers to shape or change legislation and turning every vote into a take-it-or-leave-it showdown intended to embarrass the opposition.

The vote set for Thursday, framed as a choice between contraceptive coverage and religious freedom, was not the reason Ms. Snowe made her announcement, she said. Her retirement decision was bigger than any one vote. But people familiar with her thinking say the re-emergence of such hot-button social issues helped nudge her to the exit.

Georgia Chomas, a cousin of the senator who described herself as more like a sister, said social conservatives and Tea Party activists in Maine were hounding her at home, while party leaders in Washington had her hemmed in and steered the legislative agenda away from the matters she cared about.

“There was a constant, constant struggle to accommodate everyone, and a lot of pressure on her from the extreme right,” Ms. Chomas said from her real estate office in Auburn, Me. “And she just can’t go there.”

Mike Castle, a former moderate Republican House member from Delaware and a friend of Ms. Snowe and her husband, expressed a similar view.

“All of a sudden we’re talking about abortion. We’re talking about contraception. We’re talking about social issues that were not that big a deal,” said Mr. Castle, who lost his 2010 Senate bid to a Tea Party insurgency during the primary.

“Senator Snowe wants to focus on bringing down the deficit and getting the economy on track, and that’s where the priorities should be,” said Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, another moderate who served with Ms. Snowe in the Senate before leaving the Republican Party.

With the announcement by Ms. Snowe, the political center has all but given way in Congress, with both Republicans and Democrats who fashioned themselves as common-sense moderates stepping down or being booted out.

Abortion-rights groups say that only one Republican senator who strongly supports abortion rights, Susan Collins of Maine, will remain in 2013. Mr. Brown and Senator Mark Steven Kirk, Republican of Illinois, consider themselves pro-abortion rights, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, has a mixed record on abortion issues.

Groups that seek to elect Republicans who favor abortion rights still exist, but they struggle.

“When you’re looking at the impact of all this, it should be of great concern to the United States of America,” said Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat up for re-election.

Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the senator often considered the most conservative Democrat, and Ms. Snowe, seen as the most liberal Republican, will both be gone next year, as will Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who left a Democratic Party that would not tolerate his pro-Iraq war stand. They follow a parade of centrists out the Senate doors in recent years, including the Democrats Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh; a Republican-turned-Democrat, Arlen Specter; and two Republicans-turned-independents, James M. Jeffords and Mr. Chafee.

Without such dealmakers, it is anyone’s guess how major decisions on the tax code, budget deficit and entitlement changes will be made next year, regardless of the victors in the November election.

“I’ll be interested in how all this is resolved, but I’m going to be reading about it in the paper in a duck blind,” Mr. Nelson said.

Christie Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and Environmental Protection Agency administrator, pointed to social issues as the core problem in the polarization of American politics.

As anger over the state of politics increases apathy, “only the most rabid partisans vote,” so political strategists steer campaigns to issues that turn them on, said Ms. Whitman, who supports abortion rights. For Republicans, those are often social issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception. But the rise of a new strain of fiscal conservatism has also led to moralistic portrayals of votes on spending and the debt limit. And when issues are framed around morality, compromise becomes very difficult.

“You can’t compromise with someone who’s amoral,” she said.

The return of social issues has put the dwindling center of both parties in a vise. Senator Manchin said he planned to vote for the health care amendment, written by Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, to allow employers to withdraw health care coverage based on conscience or religion. But he has found himself crosswise with his state’s Right to Life organization because he opposed cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, since he was satisfied that none of those funds went to abortion services.

Ms. Snowe may have just grown fed up. At raucous Republican caucuses in February, her name was greeted with jeers from some Tea Party activists. Republicans had seized control of the governor’s mansion and the State Legislature in 2010, but for the most ardent conservatives, it was not enough, Ms. Chomas said. Ms. Snowe had turned 65. Ms. Chomas’s mother, who was like a mother to Ms. Snowe, had died, followed by the mother of Ms. Snowe’s husband, John R. McKernan Jr., and the mother of her late husband, Peter Snowe.

“I understand her legacy,” said Ms. Chomas. “I just want her to be happy, and happy has been gone for a while.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Many Tough Choices, the Choice to Quit. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe